Can We Use That? A Plain-English Guide to Music, Images, and Fonts on Social

Nobody plans for this one. You publish a reel, it starts doing well, and two days later the audio is gone — replaced by silence and a notice you have to tap twice to read. Or you put budget behind your best post and the ad gets rejected over the track. Or a client asks whether you have the rights to the photo in your header, and you realize you have no idea where it came from.

This is the least glamorous part of running social, and the part most small teams improvise — not out of recklessness, but because the rules live in six places, written by lawyers, and nobody has an afternoon to read them.

Here's the practical version. Not legal advice, and no substitute for a lawyer on anything high-stakes — but enough to stop those three failures happening to you.

Start with one question: is money behind this?

Almost every rule here bends around a single line: organic post, or paid promotion?

Licenses that cover an ordinary post on your own feed very often stop the moment you boost it, run it as an ad, put it on your website, or hand it to a partner. That's the most common way small brands get caught — not by posting something they shouldn't have, but by promoting something they were only ever licensed to post. So before you reach for a track, a photo, or a face, ask whether this might later have money behind it. If the answer is "possibly," license it as though it already does.

Music: the trap almost everyone falls into

Platform music libraries are genuinely free to use — inside that platform, on an organic post, within the catalog your account can see. That last clause matters: accounts categorized as business or brand typically see a smaller catalog, because commercial rights for many popular tracks were never negotiated. If a song you expected isn't there, that's usually why, and switching to a personal account to get it is borrowing a license you don't have.

Three things the in-app license almost never covers:

• Taking the video somewhere else. Downloading your own reel and re-uploading it to another platform, your site, or a client deck takes the audio outside the agreement it came with. This is where muting and takedowns happen.
• Putting money behind it. Many in-app tracks are explicitly marked unavailable for promoted posts or ads.
• Anything offline. Events, shop displays, a video on a product page.

If you cross-post the same video everywhere — and most small teams do — the clean answer is a subscription library like Epidemic Sound, Artlist, Soundstripe, or Uppbeat. You pay monthly, download the track, and the license travels with the video across platforms and into ads. Check one thing before subscribing: what happens to videos you've already published if you cancel. Some providers cover them permanently, others don't.

Two myths worth retiring. "Royalty-free" means you don't pay per play — not that it's free of cost or free of rules. And no magic duration makes a clip safe; seven seconds of a commercial track is still using it.

Images: the license is on the page, and it's short

Free stock sites each publish a license page that takes two minutes to read. Most allow broad commercial use and draw the same few lines: don't resell the photo itself, don't use an identifiable person in a way that implies endorsement, don't treat the library as a logo source. Beyond that, three distinctions do the work:

• Editorial-only images cannot be used in advertising. Paid stock sites label these clearly; they exist for news and commentary.
• Ads featuring recognizable people or private property need releases. Stock sites say per image whether a model or property release exists. Rarely bites on organic posting; does on a paid campaign.
• Google Images is a search engine, not a stock library. An image appearing in results says nothing about whether you can use it — and it's still the most common source of trouble.

For AI-generated images the rules come from the tool, not the platform you post to, so check its terms for commercial use; our decision guide on AI images versus real photos covers when each is the right call. For customer photos and reviews, a tag is not permission — the UGC system post covers how to ask.

Fonts: licensed by use, not by download

Fonts are software, and their licenses split by how you use them. A desktop license covers making graphics on your machine; the same font on your website needs a webfont license; embedding it in an app is different again. And plenty of fonts marketed as "free" are free for personal use only — which a brand post is not.

Two rules keep you clear. Default to open-licensed families (Google Fonts and similar) for anything living on multiple surfaces. And if a typeface is going in your logo, check specifically — some licenses require an extended license for that even when ordinary design work is covered. Either way, record the font names and license type in your visual consistency system so nobody has to re-solve it.

Other people's posts, memes, and logos

Screenshots of other people's posts. The convention is credit plus a link, and most people are pleased to be quoted. It stops working when their content is the entire value of your post rather than evidence inside your point. If you're building a post around someone's work, ask.

Memes and templates. The format is free; the specific photograph, film still, or screenshot inside it may not be. A meme that's been everywhere for five years is low risk. A frame from a show that aired last week isn't the same thing.

Other brands' logos. This is trademark, not copyright, and the test differs: referring to a brand factually — a comparison, an integration, a list of tools you use — is normally fine. Arranging their logo beside yours so it implies a partnership is not, unless you have one, in which case the brand partnership playbook covers getting it in writing.

The content you paid someone to make

Paying an invoice and owning the copyright are not the same thing. In many places the creator keeps the work unless a contract says otherwise — which teams discover at the worst moment, when a freelancer has moved on and nobody can find a written agreement. Fix it with two lines in whatever you already send: an assignment clause stating plainly that the finished work is yours on payment (or exactly what you're licensed to do with it), and source files on delivery, not just the export.

With creators it usually runs the other way: you're licensed, not an owner, for defined uses and often a defined time. Settle two things before shooting — whether you can use the content in paid ads, and whether you can run it from your own handles. Both are routine asks and expensive to retrofit. Our post on bringing in a creator covers the rest of that brief.

If something changed hands, say so

If money, free product, an affiliate commission, or an unusual perk was involved, the post needs to say so. Advertising regulators in most markets require it, and platforms give you a paid-partnership label for exactly this. Use the label and plain words in the caption — "paid partnership with," "gifted," "affiliate link" — because the label is easy to miss on a fast scroll. (Disclosing AI is a judgment call rather than a rule; we worked through when to tell your audience separately.)

Make it a habit, not a memory test

None of this is hard once. It gets hard spread across six months, three people, and nothing written down.

The habit that fixes it: store the license next to the asset. When a photo, track, or font enters your asset library, record where it came from, what the license allows, and whether it clears paid use. Thirty seconds at download beats an hour of archaeology later — and it's the only version that survives someone leaving. Then run a short check before anything publishes:

• Do I know where every element came from?
• Does the license cover this platform, and a boost if we put money behind it?
• Is anyone recognizable in it who hasn't agreed to be?
• Did anything change hands that needs disclosing?
• Could the next person answer all of the above from what's written down?

Five questions, most answered in seconds — and the ones that aren't are exactly what's worth catching before publish rather than after.

If planning, assets, drafts, and approvals all live in one place, the check costs nothing: the sourcing note is attached to the file, the reviewer can see it, and nothing goes out that nobody can account for. That's the quieter argument for running everything from a single content calendar rather than a folder, a chat thread, and three scheduling tabs — not speed, but knowing what's actually in your own posts.